EDITORIAL - Fighting the intelligent fight

Several groups have come out to take up the cudgels in the fight to save several hundred-year-old trees in Carcar that stand in the way of a project meant to widen the road to the south. The fight of these groups have been well documented, in words and in pictures, in the media.

But what is the fight for? Is it to preserve the "historical" value of the trees owing to their being very old? If that is the case, then the fight is doomed to fail as not even these venerable trees are expected to stand the test of time.

Perhaps the fight is for the environment. But the number of trees expected to be affected by the road project are too few to matter in the overall environmental scheme of things. A far worse impact continues to go on unabated even at this is being written in the hundreds of hectares lost to illegal logging everyday.

If the fight of these groups is for the environment, then maybe their energies are misdirected, as they should be out there fighting the illegal loggers and unconscionable corporate ventures whose expanded interests eat away at all the world's remaining forests.

This is not to say that the trees in Carcar should be cut. All we are saying is that there might be no point in delaying the inevitable. We can keep the trees for now. But in the end, whether we like it or not, they will eventually be gone. In the meantime, who is there to measure the cost of delaying what will be?

And then there is the environment. A fight to make a stand for the environment is always good. But a fight must also be fought with an eye to the result. It is indeed a folly, as one noted satirist observed, for anyone to attack the whole of India alone with a shotgun.

Saving a few trees now will have little or no impact on the environment, and any fight waged for that cause will ultimately be pointless. The better and more practical fight would be to wage war against illegal logging and irresponsible business practices.

And the best time to wage such a war would be now, right at this very moment, when the fervor is high over the fate of the trees in Carcar. Those fighting for the trees in Carcar should redirect their attention and energies toward the right fight that truly matters.